Madamelady's Beginner's Guide
Ironfell is all about resources. You need them to do anything and to get anywhere. There are 6 resources in use at the moment. They are food, wood, iron, knowledge, oil, and electricity. There will be 8 total. The other two, not currently in use, are microchips, and uranium, and have been known to be given out for finding glitches, so keep your eyes pealed for anything weird. How to get 'em First thing's first. You arrive in your starting safe realm, with a small iron deposit, trees, and plenty of space to build whatever you like. Now what? Food. Your men grow hungry and look to you to provide nourishment. You right click (tap and hold for android) your wooden shack and make a farmer. Then you direct him to any bit of open grass in your safe zone and you right click on him. You can make a farmlet, or you c an make lots of pretty flowers. Flowers are nice, but they won't feed your troops. So make a farmlet. This will get you 60 food per hour per farmlet for the next 28 days. With the hunger of your men sated, you search for something else to do. Wood. It's everywhere. Very pretty, but taking up space. Space that you need to build an empire worthy of Caesar himself. Right click the shack, make yourself a wood cutter. place him near a particularly large clump of trees, right click again, and select 'auto-gather'. This will cause him to cut down the tree nearest to him and when it's down, he'll go to the nearest tree again until all trees are down or out of his range of movement. But fear not, you didn't just kill a whole forest. The trees will be regrown in 12 hours. If you leave him alone, your woodcutter will happily cut them down again when they regrow, until 28 days later, when he will become a blood thirsty, battle ready werewolf, without ever faltering in his unswerving loyalty to you. Now that you have run out of trees to cut, what to do with the wood? Iron. Very vital to your growth. Used to make weapons and armor, towers, castles, keeps, and catapults. Surrounding your land is a ring of mountains. Nestled at the roots of one is an iron deposit, ripe for the mining. Right click the shack, select a miner. Move him in front of the ore vein and right click him. Select 'small mine' and place it on top. This gets you 60 iron per hour until it runs out. Your empire is now ready to grow. But what is a kingdom without knowledge? Knowledge allows culture to flourish, allows new things to be built. Right click your shack, make a carpenter. Pick any space not taken up by your ample farming business and right click him. Select college. Place. You will now make 5 knowledge an hour for the next 56 days. You're gonna need more colleges. But... not for a while. These four resources are the most vital to your growth. The other two can come in later, when you know a little better what you're doing. What to do when you get 'em Now that you have all of your sweet sweet loots, you need to expand to get, unsurprisingly, more loots! This will inevitably get you into wars with your peers, but it will also allow your civilization to grow. Everything requires at least one of the resources you have collected earlier, and most require more than one. First off, iron is scarce. and while your realm may have lots of trees, they regrow slowly. But how do you expand to get more? Getting more trees to chop can be easy. Take a woodcutter to the safetunnel in your safe zone and send him on through. Depending on the number of people who have the same lobby as you, there may or may not be trees that you can easily access. If there are, awesome. If not, you're gonna have to spend a little resources. Go back inside. Take a miner, any miner, to a hilled area. Right click. There are two possibilities. Safe tunnel and risky tunnel. Both of these will get you more wood if you send someone through. A safe tunnel will (if built somewhere besides your home realm) take you to a safe realm where someone has been before, and you can send your wood cutter through. Set him to autogather and you're done, though you may have to compete with the resident wood cutter. Build a couple more. But don't let yourself run out of iron from building these, or you'll still be pretty stuck for at least an hour. You can get more iron by making a risky tunnel anywhere but your safe island, which will lead to a realm that may either have more mines, or oil (not both), but will also likely have people in it. If you're lucky, you'll get one that's undefended, and you can just send your woodcutter in to chop up the mine and then a miner (for the deposit) or engineer (made from a college, which is made from a carpenter, for an oil seep) in to build on top of it in your name. If not, you're gonna have to find out the other uses of the carpenters. Take your carpenter to open space, either in your home realm or in the tunnel, and make a barrack or two. If you make two or more next to eachother, you can double click (double tap for android) to select more than one at a time. If you don't have room to do that, then you can make two in different places, hold down shift, and click both. Right click. Make either swordsmen or archers, double click to select multiples, and send em after your newfound enemies. You can do that with any building, and you can shift click to control several units in different places. You can also make a rally point so that the soldiers will go directly to a certain place without being told (like, say the entrance to your conquest tunnel) by right clicking and selecting rally point and then picking a place. Make defenses by right clicking your carpenter (in the conquest, because you don't need to be defended in your own home) and selecting towers or walls. Walls have more health, but towers can be made into archer towers by putting an archer next to it, right clicking one or the other, and selecting archer tower. Making soldiers, tunnels, buildings, and walls uses up wood, food, and iron. But what about knowledge? This comes in handy mostly in the sea realm (through the whirlpool in the lake in your realm, which shouldn't be attempted for a while),in making stone circles, and obtaining oil... Oh, and dinosaurs, but we'll get to that in a second. Stone circles are like normal tunnels, except you (and possibly another person) pick the ends. You put a circle somewhere and set a password for it, and then later you put a stone circle elsewhere and use the same password, and those places are forever linked. If someone else makes a stone circle and uses the same password (accidentally or no) then those will be linked instead. Once you use the password for two stone circles,you can use it again, so don't be afraid to reuse. What to do once you build up your kingdom By now, you should have gotten a sizable amount of resources. Or, at the very least, be very bored. Now we can deal with the other two resources in their entirety. The industrial revolution has happened and the future is upon your kingdom. So is the past for that matter, but one thing at a time. In all your conquering, you'll likely have discovered many realms containing oil seeps, and probably taken at least one of them. With oil, you can build rifleman by promoting archers, tanks from a factory (made by your good friend, the engineer), or ironclads to help you take over the seas (ps, you can go in that whirlpool now).You can also make a whole bunch a windmills wherever you build colleges and farms and such. These get you electricity, but expire after a time, so you will need to make more later. When you get enough electricity and oil (and hopefully have a sizable amount of all the other resources) you can finally go back in time. To do this is very simple. You get access to a stone floor. You build a throne on the floor with a stone mason, make a princess, promote that princess to queen (her mother had a very tragic past and death, now she must take over her kingdom). You make a university with the queen, make an inventor. Take the inventor to... well, any realm you want. Make a time controller on grass. Use the time controller to make a time capacitor on a hill. And last but not least, use the time capacitor to make a prehistoric time gate. Go through. You now have access to your very own dinoworld. That, of course, can be broken into and then will not be yours. There should be tons of dino eggs, and, with some luck, you'll get a wild oryctodromeus egg, which is three little spheres on top of eachother on a lighter green tile called swamp. with this you can make burrows, which are destroyable tunnels, on swamp tiles. From there, you can get the most crucial dinos for expanding. The best to start out with are the Diplodocus, the Ankylosaurus, the Oryctodromeus, and the Velociraptor. If you get those, you can get anything. Good luck, and happy hunting. Madamelady out.